Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004060823
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LIBERTY CORNER, N.J. - LENGTH: Long
There was the understanding they would be set free of the "mucky-mucks."
And the inspirational spirit was a plucky man named James D. Stryker, whom colleagues call the Strykeforce, as if he were a comic-strip superhero of business.
More than two years ago, under the code name Operation Lightning, a grab-bag team in the power-tool division of the Ingersoll-Rand Co. embarked on a game attempt to make a new product in one-third the normal development time.
The team members brought a range of skills and temperaments, coupled with an airy disdain for conventions, to the task of creating an air grinder, a $225 flashlight-sized tool to finish and polish the pieces that become everything from barstools to jet planes.
At the same time, they were warriors in a larger battle to learn how to compress the crippling amount of time it was taking to bring products to life.
"It was taking three years to make a tool, then three and a half and it was heading toward four," Stryker said.
"Part of it was commitment, part of it was Murphy's Law. We finally said enough. Then came the blood and sweat and tears."
As it speeds toward its denouement, Operation Lightning represents one effort by one company - albeit a $3 billion machinery and equipment concern dating back to 1871, when Simon Ingersoll invented a steam-driven rock drill - but it mirrors as well a sense of urgency rippling through American business.
With the advent of the global marketplace and the feverish work ethic of Pacific Rim countries, better products faster has become not only a wish but a necessity.
Small wonder that half of the nearly 400 chief executives recently surveyed by the United Research Co. cited shortening product-development cycles as their top priority.
Sitting prim as a furled umbrella in his office in the power-tool headquarters in Liberty Corner, Jim Stryker, 46, stares across at a framed summation of Murphy's Law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong").
In late 1987, when his boss, Richard Poore, then director of sales and marketing, asked him to figure out a way to compress the product cycle, Stryker, the head of business development,spent hours glaring at the precepts of Murphy's Law, knowing they had much to do with why things dragged on.
He pondered the sorry development process, best seen as a succession of walls.
Marketing would think up a product and throw it over the wall separating it from the engineering department.
Engineering would work up a design and toss it over another wall to manufacturing,which would make the product and throw it over a wall to sales.
Those people would then try to sell it to customers who perhaps did not want it in the first place.
Things, however, never flowed that smoothly. In practice, engineering would look at what had come flying over and say, "Did some lunatic dream this up?" and whip it back to marketing.
Later, it would thunder back in revised form. When it got heaved to manufacturing,the people there would commonly smirk, "The engineers have really been hitting the bottle."
Back it would go. The point at which a product appeared was often determined by when people's arms got too tired to throw anything more over the wall.
So Stryker urged that barriers be demolished and an entrepreneurial team - uniting sales, marketing, engineering and manufacturing - work in unison.
As one team member put it: "Everyone was going to play in the same sandbox. We were going to share our pails and shovels."
How they did it
Convinced progress often stalls for want of a road map - so that one-hour meetings take five hours and the wrong people are invited - Stryker devised an elaborate series of steps, expressed in connecting colored boxes on a rectangular sheet of paper, for the team to follow.
The concept reflected not so much Stryker's genius, for it was stunningly simple, as it did the backwardness pervasive in the company.
As Stryker said: "If you asked management two years ago did they have a process, the answer would have been yes. Did it work? No. Was it any good? No."
To turn the colored squares into dollars, Poore "volunteered" Stryker to apply the process to making the grinder, a key tool whose sales growth had been hampered by a sleepy marketplace.
And, with those words, the Strykeforce was unleashed.
"I was hoping I wasn't being another Don Quixote," he remembered. "I stepped into this with just a 25-by-12-inch piece of paper wrapped around my body for protection."
In late February 1988, Poore journeyed to the tool group's main plant in Athens, Pa., and announced the intention to develop a grinder in about a year, in time for the April 1989 annual distributors' conference.
(Specifically,there was to be a family of three sizes of grinders; at first, the hope was all would be finished in a year, but one can only hope so much, and the team quickly settled for one size in a year.)
How was the deadline picked? "How did Kennedy set putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade?" Stryker said. "It just seemed like a good number."
A core team - a half-dozen people that would swell to several dozen - was patched together, led by Brian McNeill, the loquacious product manager for grinders, with Stryker effectively functioning as the coach.
What they signed up for was the biggest game of beat the clock they had ever played.
Some thought the deadline ridiculous; others knew no better. "I had never been involved in a development project," said McNeill. "I bought in on blind faith."
The team bridged two universes. Whereas the marketing side was based in a tree-lined building in Liberty Corner in central New Jersey, the engineers and manufacturing people scurried about in a squat edifice in the bucolic hamlet of Athens, tucked in the hills on the northern border of the state.
It was not lost on the team that the project symbolized not only a chance to accomplish something profitable, but also to hoist the division's status.
For among the 25 Ingersoll-Rand divisions, the power-tool division did not draw great envy.
In recent years, it seemed it might asphyxiate on its me-too products, and it was looked on as dull and trite.
In fact, people elsewhere in the corporation had coined a disparaging moniker for members of the division. They called them "toolies."
Toolies, their mockers would point out, sold commonplace things. Toolies sold cheap things.
A compressor salesman might return from a day's work with a $100,000 order.
Meanwhile,a toolie would be doing backflips because he had sold $5,000 worth of wrenches.
And the compressor man would think, why even bother?
Toolies, though, could dream, too, and not the least of those dreams was to become such a vital cog that no one would again tease them.
Position play
As the team coalesced, people were squeezed into new roles, and sometimes the fit drew grunts of pain.
For instance, Jim Halton, a sinewy manager in manufacturing,was told by his boss to transport his belongings to engineering to become the manufacturing contact with the team.
"No, I won't," he huffed. "Yes, you will," his boss replied crisply.
At the start, the team crisscrossed the country to conduct focus groups with customers to see what they wanted, including one accomplished through an interpreter with foundry workers in Milwaukee who spoke only Spanish.
For some members, this opened up new vistas. "In the 11 years I'd been at Ingersoll-Rand,I had never been out of the plant," Halton said. "They gave me an American Express card and business cards. Boy, it was fun."
From these excursions, it was determined,among other things, that customers coveted a more durable tool that was easy to fix, hard to stall and shaped to relieve the hand pain afflicting many operators.
Focus groups were also held with certain distributors to capture their feedback. Though they would ultimately change their minds, at this point the distributors thought the process was a sham.
As Tim Bradigan, a distributor in Georgia, put it: "We doubted our input would mean anything. We thought once again Ingersoll-Rand was going to make something in a dark room and ram it down our throats."
A design firm, Group Four Design, was next hired to work up sketches.
It thrashed out 100, winnowed the choices to 30 and then the team narrowed them to eight.
Some were easy rejects, like the "yellow submarine," a bulbous yellow object that turned Stryker's stomach.
In June 1988, a meeting was called to inspect foam models of the eight to pick one to be converted into a prototype.
As the session progressed,Stryker saw that the most appealing model was a sharp departure:D-shaped and fashioned from composite material, rather than circular and metal. But he began to feel queasy.
He said they should pick a second model, less radical, in the event the preferred design backfired. Tempers exploded.
Everyone grumbled this would mean more work.
"It was also looked on as a manhood issue," Stryker said. "People were telling me, `You said you could make a decision and then you couldn't make it.' "
But two it would be.
Throughout the process, weekly meetings of the Lightning team were held in Athens in a special "war room," a concrete-block,windowless chamber the walls of which swiftly became papered with engineering diagrams.
An ironclad prerequisite was that all the team members feel that they had a stake in all steps.
"It was always the team's project," Stryker said. "That way we avoided the `not-invented-here' syndrome."
Significantly,top management was kept at several arm's lengths.
Some team members liked to refer to the senior executives as the "mucky-mucks," a reflection of a belief that what they did best was muck up a lot of uncannily brilliant work done by the troops.
The mucky-mucks were kept informed and did do a little nosing about, but for the most part the team operated in the corporate bliss of a mucky-muck-free existence.
To build cohesion and calm addled wits, Stryker and McNeill made a point of staging recreational outings.
Once the team journeyed to the horse races, another time to a hockey game.
A half-dozen times they congregated at Stryker's home in Clinton, N.J.
Known as the J.D. Ranch, it offered some joyful diversions.
There was a full knight in armor in the living room, nicknamed Hector the Protector.
There was a pool, thick woods to get lost in and a basement basketball hoop.
But while the effort began in great fun it quickly became spiced with dissent.
No one, for instance, forgot the rumpus over the Purple Incident.
In July 1988, the team met with distributors to unveil non-working prototypes of the two models.
"Here they are," Brian McNeill said.
One was black. The more radical model, which got the nod, was purple.
The distributors regarded it with blazing contempt. "You must be nuts!" one distributor shrieked. Forget the color, they were told, it's just for this prototype.
Still, the distributors filed out feeling Ingersoll-Rand was lying and they would have to persuade customers to buy the world's most hideous grinder.
Crises turn to schisms
The team assembled soon after at the Somerset Hills Hotel near Liberty Corner to ready a presentation to top management slated for the next day.
The matter of what material to make the grinder out of remained a sticking point.
Durability was paramount, and many members felt composite was the ticket.
But the engineers, among others, were dubious. How do you know composite is more durable? they asked. What number can you put to it?
Numbers,though, were elusive. Previously, Stryker had said he would settle the matter by dropping a composite tool and a metal tool from the top of the Statue of Liberty and having the least-bashed-up tool win.
That night, the engineers invented their own test of hard knocks.
They took a steel tool, an aluminum tool, a competitor's metal tool and a composite prototype and looped rope around each. Repairing to the motel where they were lodged, they fastened them to the bumper of one of the engineer's cars.
He then turned some bumpy laps around the parking lot dragging them behind him, until a police car roared up and ordered him to cut it out, the racket was riling guests.
The next morning, he sashayed into the meeting dangling the four tools, like a fisherman returning with his catch, and passed them around.
The aluminum was hopelessly dented. The metal tools were so scarred they hurt one's hand. The composite was still feeling great.
From them on, it was composite or bust. (The team did later subject composites to more refined testing than laps around the parking lot.)
With scant months to go, the mad scramble to engineer and manufacture the grinder commenced in earnest.
"There were times that months seemed like years," said McNeill.
"It was a matter of pushing the calendar until it screamed."
The nerves of many team members became pretty well jangled. Spats ensued.
Around Athens, the spouses of some previously chummy team members turned away in a huff when they bumped into one another at the grocery store or the cleaners.
"I got so bent out of shape at one meeting that I walked out and went home," Halton said. "I didn't return until the next week."
To conserve time, manufacturing began making parts before engineering completely finished the design.
"We weren't used to this kind of risk," said Greg Albert, an engineering member of the team.
"You think we were comfortable that manufacturing was making thousands of parts and we didn't even have a prototype we could test?"
Inevitably,the crunch forced compromises. "You started out with a wish list," Stryker said, "and as you got deeper into the process, reality started striking at that list with hammer blows."
To speed things up, management agreed to expand the budget, and so some suppliers were paid overtime.
Stryker thought the grinder's flange came out poorly. "It looks like yuck," he said. "But it was too late to fix it."
The team also opted to virtually ignore the accessories to be sure the basic unit was done.
As one member put it: "We said don't worry about the accessories. Just blow out anything."
In one case - the exhaust system - the team went with the old version, which drew scorn in the marketplace and had to be subsequently redone.
In November 1988, the most roisterous meeting of all took place in Clark Summit, Pa. Six hours passed, with fingers pointed everywhere but at anyone's own chest.
Finally, everyone vowed to meet the deadline, though, as McNeill noted: "Nobody really believed that. But they had to say it just to get out of there."
To mollify the team, Mark Amlot, the Athens plant manager, threw a dinner party at the nearby Guthrie Inn. Spouses came too.
Brian McNeill drove up for it and passed out Ingersoll-Rand gym bags with T-shirts and trinkets tucked inside.
Around this time, McNeill (who was sleeping fitfully) and Stryker began to privately discuss contingency plans.
"One plan," Stryker said, "was to show up at the distributors' conference and make one of those shadow puppets on the wall and say, `I know this looks like a duck, but it's really a grinder.' "
Yet, as lamps burned longer during the final push, the first grinder model, dubbed the Cyclone, came to life.
At the conference in Scottsdale, Ariz., some 25 grinders were handed out to great delight.
In June 1989 the tool was put on sale, and it has been selling briskly.
by CNB